


carry you

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:21:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25072282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Leah can probably count the amount of times she has spoken to Derek Hale from number 56 on one hand, so when she opens her front door to find him standing there she reckons it would be within the realm of sensible to consider this unusual activity.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 6
Kudos: 339





	carry you

Leah can probably count the amount of times she has spoken to Derek Hale from number 56 on one hand, so when she opens her front door to find him standing there she reckons it would be within the realm of sensible to consider this unusual activity.

“You’re a nurse,” he says, in lieu of a hello.

Leah simply blinks. “In training,” she says, and also, “You’re aware that it’s about three in the morning, don’t you?”

Derek’s face somehow becomes even more pinched, something Leah hadn’t ever thought possible. Since moving in a few months ago she’s been aware of him in the way you are aware of a wild bull: she’s always had the strange feeling that if she made any sudden movements he’d turn and pounce on her. The fact that his resting face looks like he is perpetually considering homicide doesn’t help the cause; it’s just means that her dreams have been particularly whack, like her subconscious is undecided on whether to be attracted to him due to his unfortunately wicked bone structure or to be deathly afraid.

Still, that he’s here at all is weird enough in itself, considering the only words they’ve exchanged have been your surface-level pleasantries, as well as that one time when he offered to carry one of her boxes up to her flat, and then had proceeded to do so in complete and utter silence. The three in the morning aspect is probably the least strange thing, because Leah supposes if there was any time a man like Derek Hale would romp around being passive-aggressive to his near-stranger neighbours it would be at the ass crack of dawn.

No, what’s particularly off-putting is the three people stood behind him, who all appear to be under the legal drinking age and also completely soaked in blood.

“Uh,” she says.

“In training is good enough,” Derek says. “Get him in here.”

For a few seconds Leah thinks he’s talking to her, and the only part of her brain that hasn’t shut down wants to point out the inexactitude of his statement due to him technically being outside her apartment, but then the three people behind him move, like a strange three-headed monster, and Leah realises it’s not so much three people as it is two people and what looks like a corpse between them. Then the corpse moans a little and she realises it’s not quite a corpse just yet.

Christ, what is _happening_. She was watching Golden Girls only two minutes ago.

They all push past her into her apartment, dragging their half-dead friend between them, Derek looming anxiously behind them. The boy on the far left, with dark hair and wide panicked eyes, glances around her apartment, and then says, “The living room!”

“No, not the living room,” Leah starts, but they all ignore her, hauling themselves through the doorway. The boy detaches from the clump and sweeps everything off her dining room table, and Derek and the last kid lift the person between them onto it, like it’s a hospital gurney. She wants to make a bitchy comment about how if they get blood on her table they’d better be prepared to pay for the cleaning, but then her eyes fall on the kid for the first time, and she feels the blood drain from her face. “Jesus _Christ_ , what the hell happened?”

He can’t be older than seventeen or eighteen, his face still carrying the remnants of teenage acne and baby fat – which is all fiercely juxtaposed by the huge-ass gash torn into his abdomen. Leah’s only been interning at the hospital for a few months, and for pretty urban part of California they get a hell of a lot of animal attacks, so it’s not like she’s a stranger to freak maulings. But this— this isn’t like anything she’s seen before. She can’t even begin to imagine what animal had teeth and claws big enough to cause this.

“No time,” says the first boy with the dark hair. He is also pallid-looking, his hair stuck to his face with sweat, blood all the way down his shirt. He looks vaguely familiar – Leah thinks she’s seen him around the hospital. Melissa’s boy? “Please, you need to help him!”

“Help him?” Leah goggles at him. “No! He needs—hospitalisation, and—urgent care, an _ambulance_ —”

Next to her, Derek is looking more and more agitated. “We don’t have _time_ ,” he snarls. “Can you help him or what?”

“What do you not understand about nurse _in training_?” They all stare at her with wide, terrified eyes. “Look, can someone please tell me what the hell is going on?”

Derek lets out a sound almost akin to that of a growl. “He’s _dying_ , we haven’t got time to waste—!”

“Derek!” snaps the boy.

Derek falls quiet, but his face is drawn, troubled. Leah spares him one last glance before turning to the two other boys. Melissa’s boy, and another one, blonde, taller but thinner. They are both vibrating with anxious energy.

“What happened to him?” Leah says.

“Animal attack,” says Melissa’s boy. His eyes are damp, panicked. “Please, if you can do _anything_ , he’s my best friend—”

Leah stares at them, and then at Derek, who has shifted to stand by the wall like a surly ghoul, his eyes worried. Then, swallowing bile, she looks at the boy on her table.

Jesus Christ. What even is her life?

“Fine,” she says. “We need to hurry.”

The boys immediately snap into action. “What do we need to do?” Melissa’s boy says. Next to him, his blond friend nods earnestly.

“We need to stop the bleeding. Get a rag, from the kitchen, there should be one on the oven door. We need water as well, clean water, rubbing alcohol, there should be some in the cupboard—matches, matches, we need matches—”

“Matches?” Derek interrupts. “What the hell do you need matches for?”

Leah gives him a look. What the hell does he think she needs matches for? Does he think she’s lighting a funeral pyre? On her expensive cherrywood table? “To sterilise the needle. He needs to be stitched up.”

Derek’s face betrays very little, confirming her theory that he has only has one facial expression, and can emote very little besides pensive brooding, but she’s pretty sure the blood drains from his face. “Stitched up?”

“Yes,” Leah says. “I’m sure you’re familiar with that concept.”

Derek’s scowl deepens. _Jesus_. When she and Becca would giggle tipsily about Derek Hale’s hidden depths she always thought it would be kindness, or an affinity for knitting, or something, not schoolboy levels of drama. She is not nearly drunk enough for this. “Just fix him.”

“ _Please_ ,” Leah mutters, because it wouldn’t kill him. The look he fixes her with promises that he might just kill her, though, and while the dying boy on her table would argue her survival instincts aren’t the best, she has enough self-preservation to recognise when to back off.

The blond boy appears from the kitchen with a boy of matches and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. “I’ve got them!”

Lea takes them, says to Melissa’s boy, “The sewing kit, on top of the cupboard.”

“Oh, Jesus,” a voice mutters, and when she looks down she sees it’s the corpse, or almost-corpse. His eyes are a startlingly clear amber, framed with dark lashes. “Is that my intestine?”

“Gall bladder, actually,” Leah says. “Are you okay?”

“Does he _look_ okay?” Derek demands.

“Woah, there, Sourwolf,” the boy says, a little drunkenly. “No need to posture. We get it, big man in charge.”

“Shut up,” Derek snaps to him, though Lea notices his voice has softened. “You’re dying.”

“Not yet, Bozo.” To Leah: “You should probably get him to do something, he gets twitchy if he doesn’t exert power at least once an hour.”

“I have the sewing kit!” Melissa’s boy says as he emerges from the bedroom. Then: “Stiles, you’re awake!”

“Stiles?” Leah says. She can’t have heard that right.

“Hold on, buddy,” the boy says, tearily, “you’re gonna be fine, we’ve got you, just hold on, yeah?”

“Jesus, Scott,” Stiles mutters. “You’re embarrassing me.”

This feels like something that could only be happening in the wildest of fever dreams. Leah would not be surprised if she woke up to find she had accidentally found and consumed Becca’s entire weed stash. She feels like she’s just astral projected into some kind of bizarro alternate universe in which something like this is normal. If Derek thinks they can ever go back to being mere neighbours after this he probably needs to be institutionalised. “Jesus Christ,” she mutters half to herself, just to keep herself grounded. Then she shakes her head. If this is a trip, at least she can wake up feeling proud of herself for being productive in it. “The alcohol, quick.”

The blond boy hands it over and she unscrews it as quickly as she can, pouring some into a rag and then pressing it against Stiles’s abdomen. A half-aborted scream strangles in his throat: his face goes sheet-white and his entire body arches off the table, fingers scrabbling against whatever they find purchase in. Then, suddenly, Derek is there, taking his hand, and Stiles squeezes his hand so tightly Leah thinks she can hear bones grind.

“Jesus _fuck_!” Stiles hisses.

The look Derek gives her could probably kill a horse. For her own sanity, Leah decides to ignore it.

She wipes at the blood, thanks _fuck_ that for all the bleeding the cuts seem relatively okay: long, and pretty deep, but they didn’t hit anything important, just a lot of sinew. It’s still gonna be a bitch to stitch up, though, and she risks a glance at Stiles’s face, who is gritting his teeth and chanting “fuck, fuck, fuck” quietly under his breath.

“You okay?” she says.

“Peachy,” he manages.

No avoiding this now. “Sewing kit.”

Melissa’s boy – or Scott, she supposes – passes the kit over, and she prises it open, pulling out her biggest, sharpest needle and the strongest thread she has. Below her, Stiles goes pale at the sight of it. She feels a rush of nausea just looking at him. _Suck it up, girl, come on._ She swallows. “Okay,” she says, steeling herself. “This is gonna hurt. Don’t scream.”

“I _have_ been told I’m screamer,” Stiles acquiesces, but his voice is becoming less lucid. His eyelids flutter. “Is it hot in here?”

Derek’s eyes flicker anxiously. “Hurry up!”

“Okay, _Jesus_ ,” Leah says. Her fingers are slippery with sweat. She braces herself. “Okay, here goes.”

Stiles doesn’t scream, but it’s a near thing. She tries not to look at his face, just keeps her eyes on his abdomen, slowly, methodically pieces him back together, trying to keep her hands as steady as she can, but in flashes she sees his face go almost paper white. She becomes aware of Scott on one side making unnecessary moaning noises, like he’s the one currently getting sewn up, and Derek on the other. She risks a glance upwards, sees Stiles strangle Derek’s fingers with his own. To his credit, Derek doesn’t breathe a word, just proceeds to look more and more constipated.

“Are you nearly done?” the blond boy whispers.

“Nearly,” Leah says, through gritted teeth. Her fingers are slippery with blood, everything around her smells coppery. She punctuates by tugging hard on the thread, maybe a little too hard, because Stiles’s entire body spasms, and he arches off the table so hard that he almost rolls right off. “Keep him down!”

Scott grabs his arms, and Derek leans right over, pressing on Stiles’s chest. Their faces can only be inches apart. “ _Stiles_!” he says urgently. There’s a reason Leah is doing medicine and not literature, because her knowledge of subtext is close to nothing, but she think she’d have to both be blind and deaf not to pick up on whatever weird undercurrent laces that, something pained and worried and angry and afraid, and she spares a glance up, sees Stiles’s eyes clear a little, go very wide. His chest is heaving. “Stiles,” Derek says again, softer, and Stiles swallows, Leah is so close she can hear it, watches his Adam’s apple bob, and then he shakily rearranges their fingers so they’re more intertwined than anything, with almost zero deniable plausibility for anything even remotely resembling platonic. Leah realises that whatever she has just let into her apartment, blood-sodden minors and all, is much bigger than Derek Hale being the hot, aggressively antisocial next-door neighbour, something she thinks she can maybe figure out if she looks at the way he and Stiles stare at each other – but this is not her place. Right now she needs to piece him back together because that’s what she’s good at it, and like hell is she going to have someone die in her dining room. She eats dinner here, for fuck’s sake.

For a few more painstaking minutes, there is silence except for Stiles’s laboured breaths and pained sounds, as Leah tries to quickly stitch up the biggest of his wounds as quickly as she can. She finds herself settle into a fog, like she does whenever she’s working at something repetitive, zones out on everything except the puck of her needle through his skin, over and over. She doesn’t know how long she’s working for, but by the time she’s done, her thread spool has almost completely run out, and Scott has gone to throw up twice. (Where, she doesn’t know. She can only pray the toilet.)

Finally, she sits back with a sigh. Her back aches, her hands are cramped and slick with blood and sweat, and her forehead is pounding. But she is finished. “There,” she says. “He’s good.”

She feels everyone in the room deflate with relief, including Stiles himself, who lets out a breath so long it sounds like it hurts. “What did I say,” he says weakly. “Invincible, me.”

“Human,” Derek corrects, bizarrely, but he squeezes his hand with a look that’s almost something like comfort. Huh. So he does have another couple facial expressions stored up his sleeve. Stiles gives him a significant look, and Derek gives him one back, and Leah feels oddly like she’s intruding.

The blond boy inches closer to her, arms folded in on himself, like an origami bird. “Thank you,” he says quietly, his face still a little pinched. Must be a resting face. Leah finds she can’t be surprised, not when he’s part of Derek’s entourage. “Sorry for—barging in.”

“Anytime,” Leah says, a little faintly, though she doesn’t mean it. She’d be content if this remained a drug trip, though the acrid stench of blood in her nostrils is making her think that it’s pretty real. That means her table is ruined for real. Becca is going to eat her alive. It was the best thrift find they’d ever made. Then, across the room, she sees Stiles try and sit up on the table, Scott with a hand on his back, Derek by his shoulders, and suddenly all her medical training comes back to her. “Whoa, _careful_ ,” she says. “You’ll tear your stitches.”

Considering she has a considerable amount of his blood on her carpet, Stiles gives her an impressive bitch face. “I am not an _invalid_ ,” he says.

“I don’t think you have any basis to talk to me like that,” she says. She’s going to have to scrub her floors. Derek is a fool if he thinks she’s not roping him in for this. “ _Slowly_.”

Stiles scowls at her spectacularly, but does so anyway. Scott comes around next to him; he and Derek both take a side, Stiles’s arms around their shoulders. Leah doesn’t fail to notice the way Derek’s fingers tighten around Stiles’s side, like he’s trying to mould their bodies into each other, the way Stiles shoots him a grateful look, face upturned, in a way that keeps their noses an inch away from each other. Leah reckons she could probably light a bulb in the space between them.

“You idiot,” Derek says.

“Saved your ass,” Stiles says. “Again. What’s it this time, three for two?”

“As if,” Derek says.

They hobble towards the door, the four of them, the blond boy hooked in under Scott’s arm like an overgrown fawn, a big skeletal bloody monster-creature. Leah wants to shout after them about medical care and keeping the stitches clean and preferably keeping Stiles on a flat surface for the next three-to-five days but her words fail her as she watches them stagger through the debris of her apartment.

At the door, Scott turns to her, bizarrely, like he’s a friend saying goodbye. It’s so completely ot of place in the frenzy of what just happened Leah has to swallow hysterical laughter. Becca is going to piss herself that she wasn’t here to see this.

“Thank you for all your help,” Scott says. “Really.” He has a friendly, affectionate face that she recognises off Melissa; it’s still shadowed in trouble, and a strange juxtaposition against the blood on his neck, but the grateful look he gives her is nothing if not sincere.

“Yeah,” Leah says.

“Thanks,” Derek says. He’s almost the polar opposite of Scott, closed-off, giving her an indecipherable look that could equally be gratitude as it could be the promise of death, but she infers what she can, from the tightness of his arm around Stiles’s middle, the fact that though Scott is on Stiles’s other side, if he stepped away it wouldn’t make a difference. Derek is a strange, asocial creeper with unfairly good bone structure and tonight hasn’t really done anything to disprove it, though now she thinks she understands him a bit better, if only because of the way he looks at this boy in his arms.

She nods at him. “It’s all right,” she says. Because it’s not, not really, she has to get a new table, and she knows whatever she just did tonight is only an infinitesimal fraction in the fabric of whatever freaky shit Derek Hale gets up to in his free time that means he’s awake and covered in blood at three in the morning with a squad of equally torn-up teenagers who wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a Hot Topic magazine – but it was something. And she thinks she’s content with skirting the event horizon of it. Some things are just okay to be obersved. Then: “You’re coming over tomorrow to help me clean my carpet.”

Derek startles a little, like he wasn’t quite expecting that, like he expected to walk away and he and Leah to go back to strangers. But then something strange happens – a little smile tugs at the edge of his mouth, softens his whole goddamn face. Jesus Christ. This is his hidden depth. Becca is going to flip her shit. “Okay,” he says.

Leah nods at them. “Take care.”

“You, too,” Derek says – and then they’re gone.

Leah closes the door behind them, and stares at her apartment.

 _Jesus_.

She glances at the time: _4:04_. Becca’s probably awake. If not, this is worth it. She fishes her phone out of her pocket, dials her number, presses it to her ear.

“Becca?” she says. “You’re never gonna guess what just happened.”


End file.
